Real-Time Mission-Motion Planner for Multi-UUVs Cooperative Work Using Tri-Level Programing

This article develops a novel mission-motion planner for unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) when dispatching them to visit a set of marine stations in a vast and time-varying environment. Specifically, a tri-level optimization model is built for the planner to finish the task with less energy cost. The lower-level is a motion planner, which provides safe and efficient paths with local environmental information. The middle-level is a mission planner, which designs a balanced station allocation mode as well as economical visitation sequences for each UUV concerning global information. The upper-level is a commander, which manages and synchronizes the two levels, so that UUVs can autonomously decide the next destination and corresponding paths in real-time. Thereafter, different heuristic algorithms are chosen according to each level property, and their initialization processes are modified to solve the optimization efficiently. Finally, the proposed model and algorithms present their outstanding performance in complex and large-scale cases.